Governance of Higher Education in Britain: The Significance of the Research Assessment Exercises for the Funding Council Model

This article uses the political struggles that have enveloped the research assessment exercises (RAEs) to interpret the UK's current funding council model of governance. Ironically, the apparently widespread improvement in the research performance of British universities, as demonstrated by RAE 2001, has made it more difficult to distribute research income selectively, which was supposedly the central objective of the whole evaluative process. Whilst enhanced research ratings may be seen as a cause for celebration in the universities, the failure to anticipate this outcome and, more significantly, to plan for its financial implications is seen in political circles as a failure of higher education management. The article explores the alternative models of governance that are likely to emerge as a consequence of this crisis and, in particular, whether the funding councils can have much freedom of action, given the tighter political control of policy goals and their critical dependence upon the academic profession for the conduct of the evaluative process.     

Diagnosing the Poor Performance of Self‐worth Protective Students: A product of future outcome uncertainty,evaluative threat,or both?

Self‐worth protective students characteristically perform well on some occasions yet on other occasions they perform poorly. In this study, two accounts of the poor performance of self‐worth protective students are assessed. The first is that their poor performance is an outcome of evaluative threat. The second is that their poor performance is an outcome of future outcome uncertainty: a product of their uncertain global self‐esteem and uncertainty about the causes of achievement outcomes. Students high or low in self‐worth protection were exposed to either noncontingent success (creating future outcome uncertainty), noncontingent failure (evoking evaluative threat), or contingent success. Their ability to solve two tasks that involved a high degree of uncertainty was then assessed. Students high in self‐worth protection performed poorly following both noncontingent failure and noncontingent success, supporting the roles of both evaluative threat and future outcome uncertainty. The implications in terms of enhancing the achievement of students high in self‐worth protection are discussed.     

Thema and FRBR's Third Group

The treatment of subjects by Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) has attracted less attention than some of its other aspects, but there seems to be a general consensus that it needs work. While some have proposed elaborating its subject categories—concepts, objects, events, and places—to increase their semantic complexity, a working group of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) has recently made a promising proposal that essentially bypasses those categories in favor of one entity, thema. This article gives an overview of the proposal and discusses its relevance to another difficult problem, ambiguities in the establishment of headings for buildings.     

The Capricious Nature of Theory of Mind: Does Mental State Understanding Depend on the Characteristics of the Target?

Using a between-groups design and random assignment, this study examined 214 Turkish children's (M = 11.66 years) mindreading and general reasoning about in-group members (Turks), similar out-group members (Syrians within Turkey) and dissimilar out-group members (Northern Europeans). Children heard four mindreading and four general reasoning stories with in-group or out-group members as targets. Whereas children's general reasoning about three groups was equivalent, accuracy of mental state inferences differed by target with more accurate mindreading of in-group targets compared to both sets of out-group targets. In this Turkish sample, mindreading of Syrian targets was the least accurate. Prejudice and perceived realistic threat predicted lower mindreading. These findings have important implications for understanding how similarity and intergroup processes play a role in children's mindreading.     

Maternal Perinatal and Concurrent Anxiety and Mental Health Problems in Early Childhood: A Sibling-Comparison Study

Do associations between maternal anxiety symptoms and offspring mental health remain after comparing differentially exposed siblings? Participants were 17,724 offspring siblings and 11,553 mothers from the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort study. Mothers reported anxiety and depressive symptoms at 30 weeks’ gestation, and 0.5, 1.5, 3, and 5 years postpartum. Child internalizing and externalizing problems were assessed at ages 1.5, 3, and 5, and modeled using multilevel analyses with repeated measures nested within siblings, nested within mothers. Maternal pre- and postnatal anxiety were no longer associated with child internalizing or externalizing problems after adjusting for maternal depression and familial confounding. Maternal anxiety when the children were in preschool age, however, remained significantly associated with child internalizing but not externalizing problems.     

Children's Understanding of Logical Inconsistency

Five experiments involving 245 participants examined children's understanding of logical consistency. For instance, a character said that a man was both tall and very short. Only by 6 years of age did children show any understanding of logical inconsistency. This occurred despite: (1) good memory for the characters' claims; (2) the use of three different question forms including whether a person had made sense, said something silly, or whether both things a person said could be right; (3) the ability to identify other types of statements (e.g., factual inconsistencies) as not making sense; (4) the ability to compare and contrast the characters' claims in other ways; and (5) attempts to deepen children's processing of the claims by asking them to draw what each character said. Similar to false belief understanding, there was a monotonic relation between the number of older siblings a child had and logical consistency understanding on one of the tasks. It is argued that children may fail the different consistency tasks because of both logical factors (e.g., insufficient insight into logical necessity) and nonlogical factors tied to their social knowledge or insight into representation.     

Continuity and Change in the Collegial Tradition

This article has four main purposes: to explore the meaning of the idea of collegiality, to consider its importance in the governance of British institutions of higher education, to examine the pressures for change that have been exerted upon both the collegiate model of the university as well as upon the idea of collegiality, and to ascertain what relevance – if any – the idea of collegiality has in the context of a system of mass higher education. The article is a report upon ongoing research, of which interviews with some fifty Oxford academics and officials form the core of its empirical base. Naturally we welcome feedback. An important subtheme is our attempt to understand the process of change in British higher education. Our analysis suggests that the change process is best understood through an analysis of the interaction between state pressure for change and developments within the character of the academic profession.